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Thank You, Cisco

After a years-long quest to acquire Connectify.com, we’re finally the proud owners of the dot com domain extension for the Connectify brand. But, as it turns out, we wouldn’t be anywhere without the surprisingly awesome show of goodwill from the folks at Cisco. Find out how the networking giant helped us, and how we’re saying thanks by offering all Cisco employees free access to our apps (see bottom of post).

When Connectify launched back in early 2010, Connectify.com was unavailable, despite the fact that there was no active site or parked page on the domain. In the interest of a timely launch, we chose to go instead with Connectify.me. While that URL was parked, we were able to contact the owner and purchase it for a reasonable price. Our brand quickly became synonymous with Connectify.me, but as our product became more and more sucessful, we knew that we also needed to acquire Connectify.com in order to capture the maximum amount of users looking for our site and as a defensive measure in protecting our brand.

Tens of thousands of new users were already finding their way to our site each day, but how much more type-in traffic were we missing from folks that went straight to their address bar and entered www.connectify.com after hearing about us from a friend? We wanted all of that connectify.com traffic to be immediately redirected to our homepage at www.connectify.me. The story of trying to acquire the dot com domain for our brand is a complicated one that has spanned the last three years and is largely too long and circuitous to share here (how much time do you have?). Suffice it to say, at different points there were three separate parties (all with legal representation), who believed they owned the domain. We wanted to buy it, but no one could even agree who owned it long enough to take our money! We realized all this turmoil was not getting us anywhere. Since we own the trademark for Connectify, we decided that it was best to file a complaint to ICANN about our dilemma.

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It’s hard to believe that Cisco was the hero in this long, convoluted story. But, once they caught wind of our ICANN proceeding, they responded quickly… and that response really blew us away: After realizing that we were the rightful owners of the Connectify trademark, Cisco took it upon themselves to sort out their own domain transfer snafu and simply hand the connectify.com URL over to us. That’s right, Cisco and their army of lawyers declared that we, Connectify, should have the domain name, and they were going to give it to us. And that’s what they did. They didn’t do it for money, and they didn’t charge us. Simply put, Cisco cleared up a mess by doing the right thing.

As of now, you can reach us even when you type in www.connectify.com. Beautiful, right? Such a fitting domain for a company called Connectify. So, thank you, Cisco. It was refreshing to interact with such amazingly proactive and thoughtful folks at such a big organization.